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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "wine"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Thu, 21 Apr 2016 17:00:00 PDTDailyDirt: Old, Old Wine, Goes To My Head...Michael Hohttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110506/03230414183/dailydirt-old-old-wine-goes-to-my-head.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110506/03230414183/dailydirt-old-old-wine-goes-to-my-head.shtmlfool tastebuds when it comes to aged wine -- a more expensive-looking bottle or just a good story is sometimes enough to make people think a wine tastes better than it does. No one trusts wine that comes out of a plastic spigot on a box, but if you tell people you've gone to extraordinary lengths to store wine for years, some folks are willing to cough up thousands of dollars for the chance to drink it. If you're a knowledgeable wine drinker with a lot of disposable income, check out a few of these aged wines.

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

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]]>urls-we-dig-uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110506/03230414183Thu, 10 Mar 2016 23:23:00 PSTMiddle Earth Enterprises Attempts To Block Wine Importer From Using The Word 'Hobbit'Timothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160223/09431333686/middle-earth-enterprises-attempts-to-block-wine-importer-using-word-hobbit.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160223/09431333686/middle-earth-enterprises-attempts-to-block-wine-importer-using-word-hobbit.shtml
We've seen all kinds of strange trademark actions revolving around the works of Tolkien, including threats against holiday campsites and pubs. The dual threat of dumb in these disputes always ends up being both the protectionist aims against businesses that don't operate anywhere near the literary or theatrical realms in which Tolkien's works normally operate and the sketchy history of the term "hobbit" itself, with it being rather clear that Tolkien both didn't invent the word itself and actually based his hobbit characters on previous fictional works. This of course hasn't precluded anyone with any kind of ownership stake in rights associated with Tolkien from sending out threats to anyone and everyone that in any way uses the term.

A tall wife and her short husband are locked in a legal battle over whether they are allowed to have the word 'Hobbit' in the title of their wine business. Stuart and Elise Whittaker set up Giraffe and Hobbit, which imports wine from small vineyards in Provence, France, in the summer of 2014 to poke fun at the difference in their heights. But American company Middle-earth Enterprises, which owns the copyright to the word 'Hobbit', is trying to block the couple's attempt to register the company as a trademark.

Mr Whittaker said: "We applied for the trademark with the Intellectual Property Office, we decided on the name already, it had nothing to do with the Hobbit film or Lord of the Rings. It is a reference to the fact my wife is quite tall and I'm not so tall."

This is nearly the definition of when a term either becomes generic in nature or too broad to deserve wide trademark protection. In naming their company, the Whittakers weren't thinking about Tolkien. Hobbit meant "short person" to them, not "race of people from the The Lord of the Rings universe." When coupled with the fact that theirs is a wine business, having nothing to do with the film or literature industries, the opposition from Middle-Earth Enteprises leads us to a common mantra: this is not what trademark is for.

Par for the course, the opposition was carried out in the most irritating manner possible.

A couple of months after attempting to register their trademark, Giraffe and Hobbit, the couple were sent a Notice of Threatened Opposition from American firm The Saul Zaentz Company.

The 36-year-old added: "We got the Notice of Threatened Opposition the day before it was going to go through and a registered trademark."

The diminutive Whittaker goes on to note, correctly, that Tolkien admitted that he didn't come up with the term. This matters less in trademark terms than copyright, but is still an indication that the term is not unique or source-identifying. Meanwhile, it stretches credulity to think that Middle-Earth Enterprises could somehow show that there would be confusion at stake here. But, hey, just another day in the world of trademark bullying by someone associated with Tolkien.

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]]>stop-wininghttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20160223/09431333686Mon, 23 Nov 2015 23:06:38 PSTBarefoot Wine Contests Trademark Of Barefoot Kombucha: Tea Or Wine, Who Can Tell?Timothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151120/06410332871/barefoot-wine-contests-trademark-barefoot-kombucha-tea-wine-who-can-tell.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151120/06410332871/barefoot-wine-contests-trademark-barefoot-kombucha-tea-wine-who-can-tell.shtml
We've had a few instances in the past involving wine-makers and needless trademark spats with companies in completely unrelated industries. The time Trek Bicycle went after a winery, comes to mind for instance. More recently, and somewhat more appropriate to this post, was the trademark dispute between a winery and brewery with similar names. The question in that case was whether or not wine and beer were distinct enough products so as to be essentially operating in different industries and, therefore, not fall under the trademark provisions for their respective marks.

This case is even dumber, as Barefoot Wine is contesting the trademark registration of Barefoot Kombucha. Kombucha, you may not be aware, is a tea drink, and Barefoot Kombucha isn't even an alcoholic drink.

A Virginia husband-and-wife kombucha operation is defending its name in trademark court against the world’s largest winery. Ethan and Kate Zuckerman, the couple behind Barefoot Bucha, are currently involved in trademark litigation with E. & J. Gallo, the parent company of Barefoot Wine, which opposed the craft kombucha brand’s trademark application earlier this year, claiming the brand is “confusingly similar in appearance, sound and meaning to the Barefoot Marks.”

So the side discussion of this spat could revolve around the logos of the companies (which are somewhat dissimilar), whether or not the inclusion of the specific kind of drink, wine vs. Kombucha, would negate any customer confusion, or exactly how similar the total packaging of the two company's products is (not very). But we shouldn't really have to do any of that. One of these products is tea and the other is wine. One of them is alcoholic and the other is not. If that isn't enough of a distinction to declare that the two companies operate in different marketplaces, then I don't know what is.

Kate Zuckerman echoed a similar sentiment in a call with BevNET Wednesday, saying “Trademark law was written to protect consumers but in practice a larger company can challenge a smaller business in court and it’s a lengthy, time-consuming, expensive, stressful process.”

Zuckerman also argued against the wine corporation’s aforementioned “confusingly similar” claim that consumers would mistake the products for one another in stores.

“Kombucha is a totally different product from wine,” Zuckerman added. “We’re carried in different retailers, we’re in different bottles We just don’t believe it’s likely consumers drinking kombucha are going to mistake our product for their product.”

I went to get a bottle of wine but ended up with this bottle of tea... said nobody ever in the history of drinking. And, look, I take this seriously as an avid wine-drinker. I'm the exact kind of consumer Barefoot Wine purports to be concerned about. I assure you there's no confusion here.

The post mentions that the two companies have been in contact in order to settle this issue. Hopefully that amounts to Barefoot Wine backing off.

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]]>putting-the-tea-in-trademarkhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20151120/06410332871Wed, 6 May 2015 21:02:26 PDTTrademark Dispute Between Brewery And Winery Over Northstar BrandTimothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150504/05340830882/trademark-dispute-between-brewery-winery-over-northstar-brand.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150504/05340830882/trademark-dispute-between-brewery-winery-over-northstar-brand.shtml
Spend five minutes going through the exploding-number of posts we've done over the past two years about trademark scuffles in the craft brewery industry and one thing will become abundantly clear: craft alcohol has a huge trademark problem. Interestingly, craft brewers had had a traditionally amicable set of unwritten rules when it came to trademark disputes, often times choosing to work direclty with each other to find agreeable resolutions and generally being quite awesome to each other when this sort of thing came up. Under those conditions, craft brewing has exploded in popularity and the number of brewers in the United States has likewise exploded. These past two years have seen a departure from the awesomeness of the past, as trademark disputes have become more common.

A Washington state wine producer this week filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Boulder's Twisted Pine Brewing Company, alleging trademark infringement and other unfair practices. The suit revolves around the local brewery's award-winning Northstar Imperial Porter, which Ste. Michelle Wine Estates says infringes on its Northstar-brand wine by using the same name. The specific complaint, filed Thursday in Seattle, includes allegations of federal trademark infringement, federal unfair competition, unfair competition under Washington State Common Law, Washington state consumer protection violation and common law trademark infringement.

I can't recall whether I did so in public, but I've been telling my fellow Techdirt writers for over a year now that the USPTO needed to get out in front of this exact situation by drawing a distinction between the wine and beer industries. This situation is the reason why. Now that craft breweries are becoming as numerous and popular as the plethora of United States wineries, this clash of brands and terms had to happen. Had a bright line been drawn between these two very distinct industries, which overlap very rarely (winemakers don't often also make beer as a matter of percentages), this suit could have been tossed immediately. Instead, we're forced to ask a really dumb question: would the kind of person likely to buy Twisted Pine's Northstar Imperial Porter be confused into thinking they were buying something from Ste. Michelle Wine Estates because they offer a Northstar-branded wine?

No, they wouldn't. Nobody has ever gone out looking for a specific wine brand and wondered if that brand also sold beer. Conversely, nobody has ever gone out to buy a porter brew and wondered if the brewery bothered to make wine for some reason. That both companies sell alcohol doesn't matter any more than the Atlanta Hawks and Chicago Blackhaws are both sports teams: they operate in two different markets and industries. As Brendan Palfreyman, an attorney involved in the alcohol industry, notes, this is all going to come down to the question of how similar wine and beer are.

"Often times, an important issue in these types of disputes is the relatedness of the goods, because, in order to find trademark infringement, courts will look to not only how similar the trademarks are, but also how similar the goods here. Here, a key issue will likely be whether the court finds that beer and wine are 'related goods' for trademark purposes."

They shouldn't be, period, paragraph. Wine and beer are as distinct as bottled water and soda. Perhaps a ruling in this case will put us on the road to a firm distinction. The craft brewery industry has enough of a trademark problem as it is.

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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]]>urls-we-dig-uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120326/13531918251Fri, 9 Dec 2011 17:00:00 PSTDailyDirt: Endless Rain Into A Paper Cup....Michael Hohttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110203/05083912946/dailydirt-endless-rain-into-paper-cup.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110203/05083912946/dailydirt-endless-rain-into-paper-cup.shtmltaste completely different. But changing the color of the packaging might have a similar effect? Here are some interesting packaging changes for some common beverages.

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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]]>urls-we-dig-uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090112/0801423370Fri, 5 Mar 2010 12:34:00 PSTYou Can't Turn Bicycles Into Wine: Trek Bicycle's Trademark Lawsuit Against Trek Winery DismissedMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100303/1545228399.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100303/1545228399.shtmla judge has dismissed a trademark lawsuit brought by Trek Bicycle Corp. (makers of, you guessed it, bicycles) against a small northern California winery called Trek Winery. In this case, the lawsuit was dismissed for jurisdictional problems, in that the case was brought in Wisconsin (where the bicycle company is based), despite the vast majority of the winery's business being in California. But, still, the judge questioned whether or not there could actually be any confusion at all in Wisconsin. Apparently, the bicycle company cited three orders to Wisconsin -- two of the orders went to relatives of the winery's owners and one order went to a spouse of an employee of the bike company (and that single order was just a test to confirm that the winery would deliver to Wisconsin). Those are hardly quantities that would threaten the bike company's business.

Of course, this does mean that a lawsuit could be filed again in Northern California, but again, you have to wonder who's confusing a bicycle with a bottle of wine? Separately, another article on the lawsuit notes that the producers of Star Trek were originally concerned about the wine, but eventually decided it wasn't worth pursuing.

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]]>drink-uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100303/1545228399Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:18:33 PDTReason To Buy? The $1 Million Wine BookMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090824/1550215983.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090824/1550215983.shtmljohnjac points us to the news about the $1 million wine book. It is, as described, a book about wines that will run you a cool $1 million. Why? Well, because it comes with the wine it talks about. The book will list out the world's top 100 wineries, and with the book you'll get a six bottle case from each winery listed in the book. So, the book, plus 600 bottles of wine from the 100 best wineries in the world. They're only making 100 copies of the book... and 25 have already been pre-ordered, so hurry up and order.